Ironies of History

[Raphael]

They had a tiny state in the desert. The West helped them gain control of the Hejaz. That is what gave them power.

If that's true, I stand partly corrected. I think it's highly unlikely that anyone back then predicted all the consequences that Saudi behavior would have over the next 100 years, though.

[Travis B.]

They had a tiny state in the desert. The West helped them gain control of the Hejaz. That is what gave them power.

I suppose you could say that the West didn't create the Saudis, hence they didn't install them in Arabia. Would you also say that Mir Jafar already had quite a lot of power in Bengal before the British East India Company made him Nawab, so he wasn't installed by them? Or are these two cases not comparable?

Okay, I looked it up, and it is true that the Hejaz was conquered by Nejd, ruled by Ibn Saud, after the king of Hejaz fell out of the British's favor after the king of Hejaz rejected the British's plans for the Middle East, particularly the handing of Syria over to the French and British support for the Zionists in Palestine and in turn the British supported Nejd.

[rotting bones]

If that's true, I stand partly corrected. I think it's highly unlikely that anyone back then predicted all the consequences that Saudi behavior would have over the next 100 years, though.

They loaded a cult with cash without expecting it to spread among desperate third world peoples? I mean, I'm sure they didn't want fundamentalist Islam to spread in an abstract sense. I'm saying they didn't care. It didn't matter to them. What mattered was the money.

[Raphael]

I mean, I'm sure they didn't want fundamentalist Islam to spread in an abstract sense. I'm saying they didn't care. It didn't matter to them. What mattered was the money.

No disagreement there. And on top of that, in the !930s few people inside the West took any people from outside it (except Japan) seriously enough to see them as a potential threat. Ok, perhaps as a potential threat to their rule elsewhere, perhaps, but not to their own countries.

[MacAnDàil]

(written before the last three posts)
Rotting is right. The Saudis might have founded the country in 1744, but they lost control of the area twice. And the third time they gained control of the majority of the Arabian Peninsula was in 1932. This was in a war that began in 1902 against the German-allied Ottomans and they got help from the UK and Italy.

Saudi Arabia was, from its first iteration, a alliance between the royal family of the Saud and the Wahhab fundamentalists. Both are hereditary.

[Travis B.]

If that's true, I stand partly corrected. I think it's highly unlikely that anyone back then predicted all the consequences that Saudi behavior would have over the next 100 years, though.

They loaded a cult with cash without expecting it to spread camong desperate third world peoples? I mean, I'm sure they didn't want fundamentalist Islam to spread in an abstract sense. I'm saying they didn't care. It didn't matter to them. What mattered was the money.

The British were thinking in terms of short term political goals while not caring about or lacking the foresight to predict the long term consequences.

[rotting bones]

The British were thinking in terms of short term political goals while not caring about or lacking the foresight to predict the long term consequences.

That was the past. Since then, the West's strategy has evolved to take the consequences into account. The West needs to exert military might in the Middle East to secure its access to cheap oil. Therefore, Arabs are barbaric monsters, even the allies they installed in the region.

[Travis B.]

The British were thinking in terms of short term political goals while not caring about or lacking the foresight to predict the long term consequences.

That was the past. Since then, the West's strategy has evolved to take the consequences into account. The West needs to exert military might in the Middle East to secure its access to cheap oil. Therefore, Arabs are barbaric monsters, even the allies they installed in the region.

How would you reconcile this with the reality that by far the greatest source of America's oil today is North America itself?

[Raphael]

What confused me at first was that when rb talked about "The West", at first I assumed they meant "the USA", so I was like "Huh? The USA had a Middle Eastern policy in the 1920s?" If we're talking about the British, that makes a lot more sense.

The British were thinking in terms of short term political goals while not caring about or lacking the foresight to predict the long term consequences.

That was the past. Since then, the West's strategy has evolved to take the consequences into account. The West needs to exert military might in the Middle East to secure its access to cheap oil. Therefore, Arabs are barbaric monsters, even the allies they installed in the region.

The problem with the "cheap oil" theory is that I've seen it used to explain completely opposite courses of action, for instance, both the fact that the USA invaded Iraq and the fact that the USA didn't invade Saudi Arabia. A theory that can be made to fit exact opposite observations is basically unfalsifiable. And, it still doesn't explain why the House of Saud is still in power - shouldn't the West have overthrown them in 1974 and replaced them with someone who would have broken with the OPEC policies of the time?

[rotting bones]

How would you reconcile this with the reality that by far the greatest source of America's oil today is North America itself?

1. That is a very recent development. A corporate-allied president started talking about pulling out of the Middle East right as it happened.
2. Even so, the more oil you get, the cheaper it is. (Edit: Assuming, of course, that it doesn't cost too much to extract it.)
3. Most of China's oil comes from Saudi Arabia. Cheap goods sold in America are manufactured there.
...

What confused me at first was that when rb talked about "The West", at first I assumed they meant "the USA", so I was like "Huh? The USA had a Middle Eastern policy in the 1920s?" If we're talking about the British, that makes a lot more sense.

After WWII, America took up many of Britain's strategic objectives.

The problem with the "cheap oil" theory is that I've seen it used to explain completely opposite courses of action, for instance, both the fact that the USA invaded Iraq and the fact that the USA didn't invade Saudi Arabia. A theory that can be made to fit exact opposite observations is basically unfalsifiable. And, it still doesn't explain why the House of Saud is still in power - shouldn't the West have overthrown them in 1974 and replaced them with someone who would have broken with the OPEC policies of the time?

The rate which the House of Saud was offering them vs. the cost of an invasion? (Edit: Especially of someone who is otherwise your ally.) I could be wrong. I haven't looked into that.

[rotting bones]

Regarding Prussia: I read this stuff a long time ago, so IIRC on everything. Bertrand Russell, who went to jail for opposing WWI, agreed that Prussia wasn't as bad as the propaganda made it out to be. On the other hand, he also said that until the end of WWI, Prussia's popular government institutions didn't exist to let the people control the state. Their purpose was to "instruct" the people as to why their wise monarch had chosen his course of action.

[Raphael]

Bertrand Russell, who went to jail for opposing WWI, agreed that Prussia wasn't as bad as the propaganda made it out to be.

Well, yes, if you oppose a war, you have a strong psychological motivation for making up excuses for the other side in that war. That's not exactly surprising.


EDIT: I generally think that Prussia probably was as bad as it was made out to be. Whether it was worse than the other great powers is a different question, though.

[rotting bones]

The British were thinking in terms of short term political goals while not caring about or lacking the foresight to predict the long term consequences.

EDIT: I generally think that Prussia probably was as bad as it was made out to be. Whether it was worse than the other great powers is a different question, though.

Remember, Britain's government had been pretty much captured by commercial interests before WWI. It was autocracy vs. the free market. If you think capitalism is progressive compared to monarchism, then Britain is the one to side with.

Well, yes, if you oppose a war, you have a strong psychological motivation for making up excuses for the other side in that war. That's not exactly surprising.

Moreover, it is a common opinion among analytic philosophers that Russell's non-philosophical writings are extremely unscholarly and should be burned. Just something to bear in mind.

[Travis B.]

The British were thinking in terms of short term political goals while not caring about or lacking the foresight to predict the long term consequences.

EDIT: I generally think that Prussia probably was as bad as it was made out to be. Whether it was worse than the other great powers is a different question, though.

Remember, Britain's government had been pretty much captured by commercial interests before WWI. It was autocracy vs. the free market. If you think capitalism is progressive compared to monarchism, then Britain is the one to side with.

The bigger question is whose colonial empires were worse, e.g. the Germans had the Herero genocide while the British had the Tasmanian genocide.

[zompist]

The bigger question is whose colonial empires were worse, e.g. the Germans had the Herero genocide while the British had the Tasmanian genocide.

They were all terrible; it's like having an argument over whether Nero or Caligula was worse.

Maybe ironically, the worst evil, slavery, was precolonial: slaves were taken from "free" African countries. The slave trade was outlawed just before the scramble to annex Africa.

Now, you could say Nero was worse because he ruled for 14 years instead of 4. From that perspective, the Spanish and Portuguese were the worst, destroying two major civilizations and ruling for three centuries. Or the British, because they took over a quarter of the world.

The British— and this includes the US, Canada, and Australia as their heirs— stole land and displaced the natives to a much larger extent than the Iberians or French did. Peru is still 45% pure Indian and 37% mestizo; for the US, the percentage of Native Americans is about 2.4%.

In terms of cruelty per square mile, it's probably the Belgian Congo.

Economically, far worse than cruelty was mercantilism. The Europeans wanted markets, but not rivals, so they openly throttled development— in Ireland just as much as in India. Early economists such as Ricardo invented excuses for why poor countries should concentate on resource extraction rather than following Europe's process of industrialization.

(Now, when China was independent it did pretty badly on development— though Western advice at the time was also terrible. I supect India would have developed far better if it had been left alone, simply because it was divided into rival states. As a single huge empire, China was too tempted to stagnate. States like Mysuru were by contrast quite willing to innovate.)

[rotting bones]

The bigger question is whose colonial empires were worse, e.g. the Germans had the Herero genocide while the British had the Tasmanian genocide.

All colonialism was destructive; no question about it.

[Ares Land]

Remember, Britain's government had been pretty much captured by commercial interests before WWI. It was autocracy vs. the free market. If you think capitalism is progressive compared to monarchism, then Britain is the one to side with.

The two need not be incompatible. The Junkers you mentioned earlier were very interested in their profits.

As for rival powers... I don't know. Democracy was a bit more credible in France and Britain.
Prussian militarism and authoritarism paved the way to much trouble after WWI... though it remains to be proven if France or Britain would have fared better had they lost the war.

I don't think there's much to gain from comparing colonial empires: they were pretty much all awful. (Except the Belgians who were worse.)

The problem with the "cheap oil" theory is that I've seen it used to explain completely opposite courses of action, for instance, both the fact that the USA invaded Iraq and the fact that the USA didn't invade Saudi Arabia. A theory that can be made to fit exact opposite observations is basically unfalsifiable. And, it still doesn't explain why the House of Saud is still in power - shouldn't the West have overthrown them in 1974 and replaced them with someone who would have broken with the OPEC policies of the time?

There's indeed a lot more to the Middle East than oil. Securing Israel is a powerful motive too. Not to mention that it's at the crossroads of three continents (and two oceans through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean) and geopolitically of utmost importance.
Though the point remains, of course, that intervention (Russian, US, French, or whatever) there is primarily motivated by national interest.

On the Saudi: well, first, they're certainly evil, but the good kind of evil: the one that's predictable and you can make deals with. They were no friends of Al Qaeda, nor of ISIS (and definitely not of Iran) so they even sometimes help with intelligence efforts.
I don't how it was in 1975, but I suppose invading was out of the question, for fear the Soviets would join in the fun.

Anyway, touching Saudi Arabia is unpoliical also because of Mecca.

They loaded a cult with cash without expecting it to spread among desperate third world peoples? I mean, I'm sure they didn't want fundamentalist Islam to spread in an abstract sense. I'm saying they didn't care. It didn't matter to them. What mattered was the money.

By irony, do you mean, "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result"? If so, irony would seem to rely on the unexpected.

The result is to be expected now. Prediction is a lot easier when dealing with the past.
Nobody was overly concerned about fundamentalist Islam. Some predicted that it would indeed blow up, but at the Soviets.

People get mad whenever I link to stuff like this. Eg. Search: unqualified reservations athens sparta

Yeah, like I said, a tenuous grasp of reality.

I skipped the quotes too. But thank God this Moldbug guy's fifteen minutes of fame are over with. There's honestly not a single thing in there that is not wrong.

(Also, I like Sparta and Athens as much as anyone, but the petty rivalries between two rural states the size of a US county with a tenth the population, whose chief economic activity was growing olive trees, are probably not a good model for understanding the contemporary world. A particularly irksome point: neither Sparta nor Athens 'won': Alexander did.)

[Kuchigakatai]

Nam ipsum Latine loqui est illud quidem, ut paulo ante dixi, in magna laude ponendum, sed non tam sua sponte quam quod est a plerisque neglectum: non enim tam praeclarum est scire Latine quam turpe nescire.

That he knew Latin is of course, as I said above, worth mentioning with great praise, although not so much because he knew it but because many neglect it: it isn't after all a great deal to know Latin as it is a disgrace to not know it.

—Cicero, Brutus 140

Since the widespread abandonment of Latin as the Western/Northern European language of learning, tremendous from the 17th century, but spectacularly so in the early 20th, this seems so ironic now that Latin learners find it pretty funny...

[sasasha]

An irony of history?:

We still use the Athenian word for 'democracy', and it still largely entails the Athenian reality of 'rule by a small group of wealthy, well-born men', yet we insist it means something very different now.

(The mechanics may have changed but the outcome hasn't, much.)

[Ryusenshi]

(*) Unpopular opinion: About the one good thing that could be said about it is that it helped spread democratic ideas. Other than that, it took a century before we got a stable democracy, and pretty much everything that actually got done during the Revolution was a step backwards.

It also gave us the metric system.